How Apple’s Bringing Augmented Reality to the Masses
The iPhone 7 Plus camera is cooler than you know. Here’s why you should care.
You may have seen Apple’s keynote about the new iPhone 7, but losing the headphone jack is small beans compared to the feature that makes your new smartphone a powerful augmented reality (AR) machine.
Augmented reality groups have been buzzing about the new phone release thanks to Apple’s recent interest in the field in their other divisions, and the new camera technology they announced confirmed the rumors. But before we go there, we have to go back.
I’ve been fascinated with augmented reality for a long time, and Meron Gribetz’s TED talk (A glimpse of the future through an augmented reality headset) is one of the best explanations on why it’s going to be such a big deal for digital communication. At the end of his speech, Gribetz makes a video call to his colleague Raymond Lo. Lo appears in the stage, in real-time, as a hologram-like figure. Lo hands Gribetz an object, a three-dimensional model of human brain. Gribetz grabs the object, drags it towards himself and places it next to him, and when the call ends, the digital object is still there.
Gribetz himself works with the augmented reality company Meta. He believes that augmented reality will replace mobile devices in the future, and after watching his talk, it’s easy to think he might be right. For one, AR might be the key that makes digital communication more social. Because right now, in most digital arenas, the physical device demands so much of our attention that it separates us from our real-life environment.
And that’s a big problem. Gribetz wasn’t the first one to point it out, though. Mark Weiser, the head of the Computer Science Laboratory at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, published several articles in the early 90s related to the development of the contemporary computer (the most famous of them being The Computer for the 21st Century, published in 1991).
Weiser reasoned how the device is now at the center of our attention, forcing us focus on the hardware instead the world around us. He claimed that a computer should be invisible, the computing access should be everywhere, and the device itself should vanish into the background and be summoned by the user when needed. This idea is called ubiquitous computing, and it is pretty much the foundation of augmented reality as a whole.
Ubiquitous computing has actually been behind every step of computer development.
From desktops to laptops, to mobile, the device gradually decreased in size and became more connected to different objects and other devices. And now, twenty years later, new digital products are being introduced that turn our physical environment into an interface. That border between digital and physical worlds is vanishing.
And make no mistake — that’s what we, as consumers, want. We were happy to start using laptops because they set us free from our desks, and we were happy to start using smart phones because they set us free from our chairs. Augmented reality devices will finally release our hands. But are people actually going to lay down their mobile phones and start using head-mounted displays?
In order to imagine this future, the concept of AR has to be accepted independent from the hardware that allows it.
There is actually nothing new to the idea of augmented or virtual reality. It’s just that their recent “breakthroughs” in the consumer market haven’t been that successful.
The film industry originally introduced 3D technologies to the cinema in the 1950s to lure customers back to the theaters after television debuted. But the popularity of 3D films never truly crystallized until now.
3D films create an illusion of depth based on stereoscopic view. Today’s head-mounted stereoscopic displays use the same approach, even though the technique was invented around the mid-19th century. So yes, adding the third dimension, depth, to the user experience isn’t a new concept, it’s just that our hardware is finally catching up. But are we there yet?
Is AR ever going to be wildly successful in consumer markets?
The biggest changes have always taken their time. In his book The Invisible Computer (1998), Donald Norman, the director of The Design Lab at University of California, explains disruptive technologies:
“Most technological industries pass through many generations. Most are
incremental, offering better technologies for doing the same work within the old paradigm. Some are disruptive, changing the entire course of the industry. Disruptive, revolutionary changes are the ones that change people’s lives, and these are the changes most difficult for companies to cope with. Change is never easy from within an industry. After all, any industry has come to believe in itself, for that is how it has managed to succeed. Any new approaches will start off as small, simple, and weak.“ (pp. 232).
Looking back, the most successful technologies have often taken their time to become mass media. However, the change has became more unpredictable.
It took 38 years for radio to reach 50 million users. TV reached 50 million users in 13 years, and internet did it in four. All the big players (Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Facebook and Google) are currently developing their own AR/VR products as we speak. And some early adopters are already using headsets and Google goggles.
But immersive technology does not become disruptive technology until it has the capacity to really change lives. The benefits must be be radical enough to convince consumers to leave behind the technology they already know.
Who better to make up a new form of reality that surpases our current state than Apple?
Last year Apple bought a multi-lens camera technology company LinX Imaging, which they incorporated to the new iPhone 7 Plus. The dual-lens can capture “3D images,” recognize objects and allow some of its applications to measure dimension in a new way. This results in things like 3D object modeling, environment scanning, and real-time background replacement in video.
The lens allows the camera to work the same way as our human eyes: estimating distances, and representing content in three dimensions instead of two. In short, the iPhone now senses depth.
Most of the iPhone users will enjoy using this camera for capturing awesome pictures. But that fun depth-of-field-effect doesn’t just mean more Instagram likes on your party pics. There is a great potential for those who are curious to play around with augmented reality apps or develop their own. And it’s not just all Pokémon.
The possibilities of mobile augmented reality are only limited to imagination. Google Translate can already alter images of physical text in realtime. Augment is a platform that lets users import their own 3D models and overlay them in the environment through their mobile device. Apart from doing this for fun, it can be used for previewing physical products in the space before buying them, or for improving digital content for those using the app. And WallaMe lets users leave behind hidden messages in specific locations for anyone else using the app.
And here’s the important thing: Apple isn’t marketing the new phone as an augmented reality device. But they don’t have to. By introducing the new camera technology, Apple is building a foundation for the immersive future and engaging users with a next-generation computing platform.
On larger scale, this is going to change how we understand and what we expect from digital products today. But it’s not a revolution. The change is happening slowly, and gently.
Apple is offering its consumers a smooth shift from one communication technology to another by introducing augmented reality in a device that everyone is happy to use on everyday basis.
As Norman noted, the change might appear “small, simple, and weak,” but it’s the tiny tweaks like these that will pave the true reality of augmented reality’s future.
